2022

European Parliament bans New Gasoline Cars in 13 Years for 449 Million People, to fight Climate Emergency and Russia

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Margaux Otter at L’Obs reports that on Wednesday, the European Parliament voted to ban the sale of new internal combustion engine (ICE) automobiles by 2035, only thirteen years from now. It is an epochal vote that aims at completely re-configuring the automobile industry in the 27-member European Union, with its […]

Human Rights

Iran: 1988 Mass Executions Evident Crimes Against Humanity: Senior Officials Implicated Should Be Investigated, Fairly Prosecuted (HRW)

Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch — (Beirut) – Overwhelming evidence shows that the Iranian authorities’ mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988 amounts to crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said in an in-depth question-and-answer document released today. In 1988, Iranian authorities, acting on the orders of then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, summarily and extrajudicially […]

Climate Crisis

‘Open Your Hearts’: The Movements Taking Climate Action Where Leaders and Media Won’t

Foreign Policy in Focus

By Donna Katzin and William Minter | – ( Foreign Policy in Focus) – Media, politicians, and policymakers tend to focus on the most visible issues. The attention the war in Ukraine has received in the first half of 2022, for example, is unrivaled in the United States at least since the shock of 9/11 […]

Antarctica

Ice world: Antarctica’s riskiest glacier is under assault from below and losing its grip

The Conversation

By Ted Scambos, University of Colorado Boulder | – Flying over Antarctica, it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about. Like a gigantic wedding cake, the frosting of snow on top of the world’s largest ice sheet looks smooth and unblemished, beautiful and perfectly white. Little swirls of snow dunes cover the surface. […]

Featured

Israel’s Crisis in Parliament is a Crisis for its Apartheid in the Palestinian West Bank

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Monday evening, the government of Naftali Bennett in Israel failed to pass a crucial law in parliament, according to the Israeli newspaper Arab 48. The failure, which strikes at the foundations of Bennett’s far right vision of an expanding Greater Israel that forever forestalls any Palestinian state, exposed the […]

Guns

What Can Be Said After So Much Grief, so Many Guns?

Hugh J. Curran

Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – What more can be said with so much grief, after the spate of recent gun violence around the country? Can anything be added that has not already been said. The same questions have been haunting the country over the past two decades. Why do mass shootings appear to […]

Iran

‘New Phase Of Assassinations’: Mysterious Death Of Iranian Aerospace Engineer Fuels Speculation

Golnaz Esfandiari

( RFE/RL ) – When Iranian aerospace engineer Ayoob Entezari died on May 31, authorities handed his family a letter of appreciation in which they referred to him as a “martyr,” suggesting that he had been killed. Soon after, authorities in the central city of Yazd backtracked, saying the wording in the letter was a […]

Far Right

Let’s avoid the Other F-Word: If it is Democracies versus Fascism, We’re Stuck in Forever Wars

Andrew J. Bacevich

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History at Yale University, is a scholar of surpassing brilliance. His 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin chronicles in harrowing detail the de facto collaboration of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union that resulted in the murder of millions of innocents. On any […]

Climate Crisis

Biden’s Green New Deal: 100 Gigawatts of New Solar, in Biggest Energy Program since FDR’s TVA

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – President Biden just launched a series of executive orders and other measures for solar energy that have the potential to be the biggest energy initiatives by any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, on whose watch the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority came into being. The Hoover Dam produces […]

Archives for 2022